Oddio Overplay: Kitty Cat Songs to Celebrate Mama Cat

If true I'd never give Kitty Cat Songs to Celebrate Mama Cat a second glance. But the concept is as charming as a box of cute little furballs being given away by kids at a garage sale - and won't result in damaged curtains, yellow carpet stains and a big ugly furball making unceasing demands on your lap.

This is one of those "mixtape collections of freely available MP3 files rounded up into a single collection, with the obvious common theme being cats. It's offered by Oddio Overplay, which posts a wide and weird collection of original compositions, remixes and "discovered public domain recordings. The site's offerings are vast - and vastly uneven - but merely browsing and reading the outstanding descriptions of various collections and songs is entertaining.

The Kitty collection has a surprisingly high number of jazz compositions among the 15 full- length MP3 songs (plus several other brief excerpts and a few in other file formats). There's also a couple of broken links.

Some songs are true old school gems, including "Tiger Rag by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and the 1930ish "Kitty from Kansas City by Rudy Vallee and His Connecticut Yankees. Modern jazz heft comes from pianist Matthew Fries on "The Black Cat, part of a quintet album named one of Jazziz magazine's top 10 of 2001. And of course there's a liberal sprinkling of playfulness, much of it coming on rockish songs representing maybe one-third to one-half of the collection, depending on how one categorizes music. But don't ignore them; songs like the The Beatles' "Leave My Kitten Alone definitely possess cross-genre appeal.

The quality of this mix may be uneven but, like the runt of a mixed breed litter, it's hard not to find it appealing on a simple level. To say there's an audience for it seems obvious, but even non-pet types might consider investigating the site to see what other forms of fishiness are at work.

Visit Oddio Overplay on the web.

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